Woodworking

I had originally designed this so that the treads would be supported entirely by the hinges, on both stringers. After putting the first two treads in place, I changed my mind.

With the original design, you would be able to rotate the outside stringer 180° to create a flat 1.5 in. bulge from the wall when folded. The same width of the stringers and treads. I didn’t like the path of the outside stringer during that folding process. Instead I extended the tread to overlap the outside stringer.

You can see this in the feature image of the stairs folded against the wall. The treads are 1.5 inches above the outside stringer.

The stairs now unfold with a bit of force to move the foot of the outside stringer slightly. I will likely trim that back just a little to allow it to clear the front wall with real clearance, not pretend clearance.

With the stairs fully extended, you can see there is zero space to get onto the steps.

The space was so tight, I didn’t even put a tread on for the bottom. The current method to mount the stairs is to put your left foot on the stringer where that tread should be, then step up with your right foot onto the second step which gives you clearance to rotate and go up the steps.

The fix is pretty simple. I’m going to extend the first tread out 6 inches; for those paying attention, the WLL for that amount of cantilever tread is 600 pounds. I might do the same for the second tread. This will give me two steps forward before I have to rotate my fat ass into place.

Once on the steps, it is an easy walk up into the loft. I can almost stand up right at the high side of the loft. The steps feel very solid. My son did the jump up and down test. I panicked, but the stairs didn’t care. They are overbuilt, like an engineer worried about the extreme load.

At this point the WLL is not limited by the hinges. In this configuration all the forces are in shear. On one side that shear force is on 4 #8 screws with plenty of meat under each screw. There is very little, if any, withdrawal force on the screws. The hinges are not the weak link.

The 1.5 by 4 inch tread of Eastern White Pine is 18.5″ of unsupported span. This puts the center at 9.25″. The WLL for a 90% live load at the center of that beam exceeds 600 pounds. As stated above, the cantilevered steps also have a WLL of over 600 pounds. There is a safety factor of more than 2 in all calculations.

The biggest concern is how something like this will stand up to forces over time. The normal calculations are based on multiple uses per day. These steps are unlikely to be used more than a few times per month.

All in all, I’m happy with how they turned out. It was a pain learning how to make stairs properly. It was very tedious building, as each hinge has to be in line with every other hinge so that they will work in unison. I’ve used up all the tolerance those hinges had.

I think the biggest issue I had while building the stairs was switching drill bits. Put the hinge in place, and drill a pilot hole that is centered where I want the hinge. Switch bits to the Torx driver. Drive screw. Use a level to position the hinge correctly. Switch bits. Drill the other pilot holes. Switch bits, drive the screws.

Let’s get going. First, the bare wall.

We have a 101.25″ rise and a maximum run of 43.75 inches. We cut the master stringer and lean it against the wall and hold up a hinge and fake tread to give you an idea of what will happen.

You can’t actually attach the hinge to the stringer or the stringer to the wall until you have used the master stringer to trace the other stringer. The SKIL 20V brushless circular saw is underpowered, and with the 2Ah battery it comes with, I can’t even cut a single stringer. Thus the delay in getting the stringers and treads cut.

I’m worried about how this will all work when done, but I’m moving forward. Here it is with most of the hinges attached to the wall stringer. The lowest hinge is not attached, but you can’t see that. Three treads have been attached to the wall stringer and two to the moving stringer.

I’ll be doing the bottom step and the top step next, but this is proof of concept. Here it is in its mostly folded mode.

I didn’t have it exactly right, but it does go up further. I expect it to get easier as it gets less wobbly.

New skills are so much fun. Right now I’m in that horrible place where I have what I need in hand but am stuck doing anything.

Hopefully I’ll be finished with at least something by the end of today.

Here is the issue: I have my hut, which is becoming my woodworking shop. It is a small 8 by 12 stick-framed building with a loft. My son and I have almost finished insulating the bottom section. I’ll be installing the front window this coming week. All good stuff. But there is no easy access to the loft. And no easy way to get stuff in and out of the loft.

Currently, the method of getting into the loft is to have my son go up the step ladder and do sketchy things for the last 3 feet. The fix? Put in a staircase.

If I were to put in normal steps, it would eat up way too much space. Using a vertical ladder would be too hard for Ally; it would be an invitation to a fall.

The answer is a folding ladder. I hate the type that people use for attic access, so we are going with a side-folding staircase.

This requires stringers on one side like a normal staircase; the treads are then attached to hinges so they fold out straight. A second stringer is then attached with hinges the same way. The entire thing folds up flat against the wall, taking up only 1.75″ of space. The treads are 4.5″ wide, not to code but perfect for a ship’s ladder style.

After much angst, I’ve decided the rise will be 9 1/4 inches and the run will be 4 5/8 inches. Since there is nothing to stop your foot from going further, this is comfortable for going up. Wide enough so you don’t feel like you are standing on a rung. The 9.25 inch rise is very comfortable.

So how do you do this? Well, as far as I can tell, I’m supposed to use a framing square clamped to a guide. One leg clamped at 4 5/8 and the other leg at 9 1/4. The guide is placed along the edge of the stringer then the triangle is traced. Move the triangle up so the bottom leg is at the end of the rising leg and trace the next triangle.

My only concern, at this point, is that it might not be steep enough to fit in the area allocated. Once I verify the total run I’ll decide if I need to remove a step.

Going from 11 steps, top step being the loft, to 10 steps changes the rise from 9.25 with a smaller step at the top to 10 1/8 for each step.

Well, thanks, guys and gals; you just saved me a ton of issues.

Math is hard, but doing it right the first time is worth the mathing.

And looking up the specifications, 10.125 is 0.625 out of maximum rise for a ship’s ladder. The other option is to make the treads narrower. Moving from 4 5/8 to 4 inches. My total run is 43 3/4 inches. My original math was for a total run of 48 inches.

Which is why stairs are hard. Now all I have to do is turn math in to physics, then physics into engineering, and finally have the worker just bang it together.

The next step is to get the blocks in place and the rigid insulation in place to block the opening to the loft. That will fold accordion-style.

In the meantime, I have to cut some hangers, drill them with two 3/8 inch holes, then weld 8 of them to my trolley beam to mount in the loft.

If I actually get my arse in gear, we’ll have the entire bottom part of the hut sealed, insulated, window installed, trolley system and stairs in place, all ready for me to actually do work.

Last week’s project was to make a shooting board.

I had all the stock prepared and had started assembling it when I realized that the screws were too long. They poked out into the part my plane slides down.

This is not good. The project is on hold until I receive more screws.

A Joiner’s Box

This is a simple box to hold my tools. It is about 38″ wide, 15″ deep, and 13″ tall. I think. The design calls for a simple till, an internal box for small parts. I think I will do the more period-correct and have two sliding trays the length of the box.

I brought in my first glued-up panel for my wife to fuss over and tell me nice things. Ego stroking for sure.

She came clean and told me that it was just a board to her, not really worthy of praise.

This led me to think about that simple panel.

To get to the point where I could make that panel, I needed to build my workbench. This was a big build; it is done.

I needed work holding for the bench. I installed a leg vise and drilled holes for hold-downs. I made a batten to hold boards in place as they are planed. This was more than a bit of work.

The first step of making a panel is to be able to cut it to size. My skills at handsawing have gotten good enough that this is no longer an issue for right-angle cuts. It is fast enough that I’m not interested in using a power tool.

Next, the stock needs to be planed smooth and flat. My smoothing plane made short work of the smoothing, and my jack plane got the boards flat. I was able to quickly check for twist and flatness with my winding sticks and a straight edge.

The first board I attempted to smooth and flatten took me hours, and I did a poor job. Today it went quickly, with low effort.

That is because I’ve spent far too many hours sharpening plane irons and chisels. My slow-speed grinder now puts a 26-27° bevel on an iron or chisel; the three stones then bring that to 25°, and the strop polishes the bevel to a mirror-like finish. It is to the point where I only need to use the fine, extra-fine, and strop to bring an edge back to razor sharpness.

You can hear and feel when the blade is sharp. If I would only put the time into sharpening the irons of all the planes every day before starting, my life would actually be better and easier.

Even with a sharp iron, you need to know how to adjust the plane. Before I started this journey, I didn’t know how to do that. My planes fought me constantly. Now they are a pleasure to use.

Besides knowing how to tune, sharpen, and adjust your planes, you need to know how to use them. It is to the point where the process of smoothing and flattening a piece of stock is easy. I start with the #4, make it smooth, and move to the #5 Jack plane for the flat. Using the Jack plane at an angle to present a shearing action also makes the boards flat from side to side.

It only takes 5 to 10 minutes to make a board smooth and flat.

The next part of stock prep is to square an edge. Again I start with the #4, knock down the high spots until I have a smooth edge from end to end, and then I switch to the #5 again.

Checking for squareness is easy but humbling. Except that more and more often the edge is square after the Jack plane.

I’ve been playing with the Jointer plane. It is a huge, heavy, and long plane. The iron is wide enough to cover 2+ inches of wood in a single pass.

For my first panel, I clamped the finished faces together with the squared edges aligned with each other. Less than 4 minutes in the vise with the Jack and Jointer, and the edges are jointed.

The glue-up went very smoothly. There was a very thin bead of glue that came out of the glueline, as wanted. The final product is pretty darn good for my first glue-up in many years.

After the glue had dried for a few hours, I took the clamps off and gave it the once-over. It is not flat enough to plane the finished surface, so I worked on the back surface.

I think that this will be the last panel that I glue up that is full thickness. From now on, I’ll either rough plane the back surface or feed it through the (cheating) bandsaw to take 3/16 off the back face to reduce the amount of chips I make.

So that very unimpressive 12×13 panel represents an entire series of new skills. I’m looking forward to doing still more.

It isn’t perfect, but it is better than it was.

Tools To Make Tools

I finished my tool toot Friday. Yesterday I started work on another tool, a shooting board.

The tools I’ve made so far:

• Workbench – Functional, needs more bracing
• Winding Sticks – Used to visualize twist in a board
• Crotch board – A V notch in a flat board used to hold a board on edge for planing.
• A round-head mallet — used for hitting things
• A tooltote — to carry tools more easily

The tooltote is an exercise in barely good enough. There are so many mistakes made, and yet it still works. Not only is it functional, but I want to use it.

Once I clear space on the workbench, this will reside at the back of the workbench to organize the tools I need. The front section is large enough to hold a #4 plane, a block plane, and a #5 jack plane. The back section is a bit narrower. It currently holds my chisels. Marking and measuring tools and a rasp.

I will remove the rasp to make the tote more useful for other things, such as a marking knife, try square, and straight edge.

I need more Planes

I will start the search for a ‘fore’ plane in the near future. A ‘fore’ plane is the plane you use before all the others. This plane is used to remove lots of material rapidly. It is used in a way similar to a scrub plane.

I already have my #4 smoothing plane. I’m still tuning it. The bed isn’t flat enough yet which causes the corners to dig in a bit too much. My #5 jack plane needs some work on the iron to finish bringing it back to life. It is a joy to use. My #7 requires much work on the flats of the iron. Mostly because of rust issues.

Part of the care and feeding of these tools is to keep the soles and plates lightly oiled so they don’t stick to the wood. I’m working towards that.

This leads me to “specialty” planes. There are three specialty planes that are required for general work. The first is a router plane. This plane is used for smoothing the bottom of a hand-cut dado or other pockets in the face of a board. Think of mortising a hinge.

I found a mini version; I’m going to make a wooden version of a more normal size.

The next plane needed is something for smoothing shoulders or making rabbets. I might have found a cheap used version. If so, this will be a huge improvement in my game. In the same vein, there are rabbet planes that are designed to cut right to a shoulder.

When I’m next at the Fort at No. 4, I’m going to see if I can borrow one of the molding planes. A simple roundover or a fancier edging tool is what I’m looking for.

Cheating

If I buy a piece of 1×6 pine from the lumberyard, it will be smooth. It won’t be flat. It is likely to have twist. This means that if I’m lucky, after preparing the board I’ll have something around 5/8 thick, not 3/4.

My sawmill is providing me 4/4 rough-sawn lumber that is not smooth, but it is nearly flat and has almost no twist. Because of his quality, after preparing both faces, I will have a board 15/16 thick.

Because my target thickness is 3/4 (12/16), I have to remove nearly 1/4 of the wood. Turning wood into shavings is fun but requires time and effort.

So I cheat. I resaw my boards from 15/16 down to 13/16s. This reduces the handwork greatly.

Before I sharpened my handsaw into a rip saw I used the band saw to rip a board I used in my workbench.

Pre-drilling and countersinks

While it is unlikely that an #8 screw will split soft pine, it is always better to drill a pilot hole. The all-in-one version I’ve tried using isn’t working for me.

The nice thing about the all-in-one drill is that the drill bit is tapered, leading to a hole that is big enough to not grip the screw in one board but small enough to grip the wood on the far side, allowing the screw to pull the two pieces of wood together. The builtin counter sink acts like a depth stop and does leave a counter sink for the screw.

And it does a horrible job. I will be switching to doing this in three steps. First, drill the pilot hole, then drill the clearance hole in the outside board, and finally countersink the outside hole. If I do it this way, I know that all parts will be done correctly. Fewer stripped holes.

Screw Lengths

You’re doing it wrong! Yeah, that’s what I keep hearing in my head.

There are two types of screwed connections in normal woodworking. I.e., ignoring pocket screw construction. You can screw two pieces of wood together face-to-face, or you can screw face-to-edge.

When screwing face-to-face, it looks like the proper length should be the total thickness minus 1/4″. This gives the maximum hold without poking through the other board.

For attaching through a face into end grain, I should be using 2 1/2″ or 3″ screws. I didn’t know.

Nails

Period-correct nails are still available today. I picked up a pound of artsy-fartsy wrought iron rose-head nails to use on the 6-board box. But with what I just learned about screw length, I think I will pick up some two or three inch cut nails.

The only issue I know of when using cut nails is that you have to pre-drill to avoid cracking the boards. But you want the hole to be as small as possible to increase the grip of the nails.

Conclusion

Today I should finish the shooting board. This means I’ll be able to start my first 6-board box soon.

I’ve been building. I figured we had all heard Another One Bites the Dust more than a few times.

Today, I put the vise on the workbench. This is a game changer.

The jaws are 11+ inches wide. The vise can open around 15 inches. It is a parallel jaw vise, meaning that the jaw presses against the apron with the same force from top to bottom.

The shiny metal disk at the left front corner is an aluminum planing stop I turned on the South Bend. The handle for the vise is 1″ hardwood from the local hardware store, but the endcaps I turned myself. And then I found my 1″ bit was in such poor condition that I threw it away after it drilled two holes that drifted.

The board at the bottom of the image, on the ground, between the vise and the bench leg, is a wedge. It keeps the vise jaw parallel. It is the fulcrum point of the vise.

There is one of my homemade mallets on the table. Two crap saws, one good saw, and one OK saw. There is a 50″ straight edge and my clipboard with the plans attached.

The next modifications to the bench are to drill 3/4″ holes for side board support and some 3/4″ holes in the top for different hold-downs. Because this is a softwood top and it is thin, I need to add blocking under whatever boards I drill.

I also need to put the braces on the front and a stop on the chop (the moving part of the vise) to keep it from twisting.

I will soften the edges of the vise jaw at some point, but for today, it is fully functional. I’m happy.

On the other hand, I just messed up my tool tote build. Ally wants the broken one, but I’ll make it all work.

If you ask a woodworker if they have enough clamps, the answer is always “no.” You always need at least one more clamp.

I’ve become that woodworker. I don’t have enough clamps. So I make do.

My glue of choice is Titebond III. This has a working set time of 15 minutes, it is an extremely strong adhesive, it is water resistant, and it is “easy” to work with. It comes in sizes ranging from your standard Elmer’s glue bottle to 55-gallon drums.

My local hardware and lumber store only had it in the pint size. I’ll be ordering more online shortly.

What I learned today is that I have not been using enough glue in my past glue ups.

Yesterday I went through almost half that bottle with an 11×48 three-board lamination. And I didn’t use enough.

The first board didn’t get enough glue, but I think it will be fine for what it is. The problem I ran into was spreading the glue. I had quickly made a spreading stick, but it just wasn’t working. I switched to using my finger and got better results, but I almost ran out of time working the first board in the sun.

Even a thin layer of glue is more than you expect.

I also took a page from the machine shop and looked up the specifics on the glue. It requires 100 to 150 PSI to properly work.

For those keeping track, that means we need to be providing over 65,000 lbs of pressure for proper use. A good clamp will provide 2000 lbs of pressure. This means that I should have been using 30 clamps on that one glue up.

I hate mathing.

Have a fantastic day; music tomorrow and SCOTUS on Wednesday.

I became lazy, and it cost me a little. There are two braces that are not yet attached to the bench. I knocked one off today. Which tells me I have to do this correctly.

The bench is currently in front of the garage/shop. At the end of every day working, I pick up all the tools and move them into the shop, someplace. It is very disorganized. I then put a heavy-duty tarp over the bench and call it a night.

A few nights ago, I left a couple of tools under the tarp. The rains came. No issues. The wind got me worried. When I got out to the bench, the tarp had been partially blown off the workbench, and the tools were soaked.

I spent the next 30 minutes drying, cleaning, and oiling the tools. I seem to have saved them.

The next day was hotter; I worked to the point where I could not move. Seriously, trying to stumble into the shade wasn’t working. Luckily my lady came to my rescue with water. She then helped me move my tools the 10 feet from the workbench into the shop.

This created a need for a way to transport and store tools.

The first step is the tool tote. Mine is a simplified version of the one shown.

I could have gone to the local lumber yard and spent $75 to get some pine of some unknown quality. The plans call for true sizes of 3/4 x 5 1/2″ and 3/4 x 6″. The 5 1/2″ isn’t really an issue; that is a 1 by 6. The 6-inch board requires cutting down a 1 by 8.

The Sawmill

I intend to cut my own lumber soon. It is currently on the back burner. I have the tools; I just require the will and the time.

There are about a dozen sawmills within a 75-mile radius. The first half dozen I contacted were all big operations. One “local” mill answered the call in Maine. They have a local number; you just can’t get it easily. Another only dealt with softwood. Two were custom saw work only. They either bring their mill to your woodlot lot, or you take your wood to them and they saw it to your specifications.

I ended up going south into Morador to visit the closest mill. It was worth it.

The mill is a small, family-run operation. They have a kiln for drying wood as well as airdried wood.

I intended to get some hardwood for tools and some softwood for projects. This was some cherry and hard maple at $6 per board foot. I wanted a piece of dark walnut at $12 per board foot. Finally, I wanted some pine for projects.

Not only did he have all the lumber I wanted, he had it in the sizes I wanted and rough sawn. This means straight off the mill, no other processing.

He was generous in his measurements. There were boards that I got at 1/2 price because there was a flaw in the lumber. The flaw would not bother me, but he still gave me a great deal. The 2 bdf of black walnut was just given to me. It is two inches thick and about 10 inches per side.

This wood is absolutely beautiful.

A board foot is a volume of wood. It is 144 cubic inches, or 1/12 of a cubic foot, or 1 ft by 1 ft by 1 inch.

When I got home, I cut a 19″ piece off the narrower board and planed it smooth and flat. It was then edged which gave me a good face and a squared edge.

From there the other edge was squared. Finally the board was ripped to width, and the rough edge was smoothed and squared again.

This allowed me to face the other side and bring the piece to thickness. Starting with a 1 inch-thick piece of rough-sawn lumber, I ended up with a 3/4 S4S piece of wood.

What was under the rough surface is beautiful.

Yesterday, I surfaced the piece of dark walnut. With no oil or finish on it, just planed flat, it is one of the nicest pieces of lumber I’ve ever seen.

Knowledge is not Skill

There is a process in machining that is bringing a piece to size. This is the process of making all the faces flat and square to each other. Each of 6 faces must be properly milled to have a piece ready.

Woodworking requires the same operation, but the tools are much simpler which requires the layouts to be much better.

With this first piece, I did not notice that the edges were not parallel to each other. They were smooth and flat and square to the finished face. They were not parallel.

The process is different from machining. When you are machining, you only need one reference face to start the process.

For woodworking, you first smooth a face. This does not make the board flat; it just means that it is smooth. This is a 5-minute process for me at this point. Smooth means that within a local area, the board is flat. The size of that area depends on the tools used to smooth it.

Next, the board needs to be made flat. This is done with a straight edge. By moving a straight edge down the face, you can check for space under the straight edge, indicating where the board is low. You plane off the high spots until you have a piece of lumber that is smooth and flat.

After flattening the surface, you now need to test for twist and then remove the twist. Twist is called “winding,” and you use a pair of self-balancing straight edges at opposite ends of the board. You can sight over the closer stick and easily see if the board is twisted. If it is, you can plan out the twist.

Next, you smooth and flatten an edge, making it square to the board. The squareness of the edge to the face is measured with a try square or any other precision right-angle square. This is a skill I am still working on. The near edge is always to high.

This is where I made a mistake. I wasn’t paying enough attention and ripped the board over wide and then brought the edge back to square after the rip. I didn’t make a guide mark for parallel.

I also didn’t get the board flat enough.

Yesterday, I finished the backboard and the two sideboards. Today, I’ll be attaching them to make the first part of the assembly.

Sharper, Sharper

Friday I thought I had a sharp plane blade. It was able to remove 1/4 inch from the faces of the end boards.

Yesterday I learned that my plane was not sharp. I spent a good hour sharpening plane blades. I’ll spend still more time today.

The difference is really incredible. What was an upper body workout becomes light work. Plus the sound of the wood being peeled away is beautiful.

What I need to do today is to finish sharpening the jack plane. Currently it is only cutting on the corners. I’ve touched up the blade on the diamond wheel, but I still need to take it through the regular sharpening process to get a blade that works as I want it to.

I will also be focusing on making sure I don’t produce cupped boards.

All in all, I’m very excited to get the next few projects finished.

The tool tote, a couple of boxes. The first being a simple 6-board box for reenacting. Then a jointer box to hold my wood tools well organized and safe. Then a stool and the start of other projects.

There is so much more pride in using hand tools and fitting pieces by hand then the feeling I got when I feed wood through my jointer and planer.

This is a beautiful piece of furniture. I made a workbench.

The beauty of this bench is such that I would be afraid to use it. It is that darn beautiful.

My bench is 60″ by 27″ by 34.5″ It was made from construction lumber, 2x10s, 2x4s, and 4x4s. Now that it is done, I don’t know that I can move it. It is that heavy. I might have to get retractable wheels for it.

This is the basic starting tool for woodworking. Until you have a chance to work on a real workbench, designed for hand tools, you don’t understand just how much of a tool it is.

For years, my goto woodworking bench was a sheet of 3/4″ plywood over a frame of 2x4s. It was stable enough, but it wasn’t really usable for planing.

There are several things that hand woodworkers do constantly. We saw boards either ripping, resawing, or crosscutting. Cutting tenons is an example of both. We drive chisels into wood and dig out mortises. We make boards flat and straight by planing.

If you swing a mallet and hit something and your mallet bounces, that is wasted energy. A solid workbench doesn’t bounce; it acts perfectly with the mallet, allowing hard strikes or controlled strikes.

If you are planing you need the work to stay in place. If you have your work attached to a flimsy work surface, every time you take a cut, the work and work surface move, stealing work. If you brace your foot against your work surface, you are unlikely to be in the correct position for planing.

If you are sawing, you want the work at the height at the correct angles.

Adding a leg vise to the bench will make it even better. That is happening over the coming days.

I’ll be drilling some holes for bench dogs and other work-holding tools.

So here is the astonishing thing: I had a round item on the workbench, I was planing a test piece. That round item did not move.

The number of times I’ve had things fall off a table because it is wiggling…

I’m excited.

Conclusion

The next steps are to make and attach a leg vise to the table. After that is adding some blocks to the underside of the table where I’ll be drilling 3/4″ holes for the work-holding thing.

There are two projects that come next: a journeyman tote to carry my tools and a 6-board chest for Ally for use at events.

After that is a knockdown cabinet with shelves for Ally to use at events.

Side Note

I was picking up some stair treads at Home Depot on Tuesday. As we were checking out we noticed a sale on the Husky 5-tier tote storage rack. The totes are 27 gallons with the nice flexible plastic. Each rack holds 8 totes by their upper edges and two more can be placed on top for a total of 10 totes.

The totes were on sale for $8 apiece. The rack was $149.

If you are looking for more storage, this might be the right thing for you.

For lack of a nail and all of those things. Never a truer statement was made.

I have three workbenches in the shop. One is filled with machining detritus. It always needs to be cleaned up. The second currently is full with a mini-mill and storage containers that are waiting to be placed on the wall. The third is the grinding station with two bench grinders. One wheel is accessible because have the bench is blocked by wood that is waiting for a home.

Moreover, none of these workbenches are set up to be used for wood working. There is a copper jawed vise on the machining workbench. That workbench is a 24-inch by 96 sheet of 3/8 inch plywood atop a pair of 2x4s resting on a pair of folding saw horses.

If I bang on it, everything on the table jumps.

The mini workbench is stable enough, but it is set up for electronics work, doesn’t yet have good lighting, It is only 60-inches long, no vise and no room for working on longer boards.

The third is in a corner with no real access.

Thus, the new workbench.

Joinery

I’m sure this could be knocked together in a couple of days, but that’s not me.

For the first trestle, I did knock it together. Construction adhesive and good old fashion screws. It was strong enough, but not pretty, and I can see my errors today.

The end apron, a piece of 2×10 by 24 inches cupped. I didn’t understand what this really meant when I put that apron on.

The difference between knowledge and skill.

It took me almost two weeks to get the braces cut. Some of that was plain stupid choices in my past. I didn’t have a saw that would for cutting the tenons.

Mostly, it was lack of skill and rain.

I’ve gathered more knowledge and a bit more skill.

To get good joints, you need to have flat, smooth, square connections. I didn’t have that.

Smoothing

I’ve located some 5 wood planes so far. I knew of 2 of them, I suspected 1 more. I found 3 more after that. I also picked up 3 planes for a few dollars each, used.

That’s a total of 8 planes. Two block planes, Four #4 style planes. One #5 plane. One jointer, I think it is a #8 or #9.

One of the #4s is a piece of junk. It is stamped steel for the frog. Even after spending a couple of hours working on it, it doesn’t cut worth a damn. The second #4 isn’t ready yet. It has so much paint and gunk on the sole, that I haven’t gotten it ready yet. The third is a new Stanley #4. I’ve not checked it out yet.

That leaves one, #4. It is an older Stanley with a slightly cupped sole, but I have it mostly tuned, and it is doing its job of smoothing.

I realized that the #5, jack plane, hadn’t been checked since I purchased it 30 years ago. It needed sharpening, but is now doing a fine job.

Those two and a block plane I was playing with are all work ready.

This gets me smooth boards.

Flat

A smooth board is one that doesn’t have any roughness, but it might not be straight nor flat.

To make it flat, you need to test for flatness with a straight edge. Using an expensive Starrett combination square for woodworking messes with my head. I have multiple combination squares, but this one is my nicest.

You can have a board that is very smooth, but which undulates the length of the board. A longer plane, like a jack plane, will help with that, but ultimately, you need to locate those undulations with your straight edge.

After making sure your board is smooth, you set to work with your straight edge to find and mark all the high spots.

Knocking down the high spots will make the board flat. Using a longer plane will help isolate where you are cutting to just high spots.

The problem is that the longer the plane, the more work it is to use. They get heavy and that means more work. They also don’t cut as fast because they can only shave the high spots in that longer distance.

I am to the point where I can do this. I have the skill to make a board smooth and to remove the high spots.

This leaves the board with one more potential issue, twist.

Twist

Just because your board is smooth and flat in a local area does not mean it is flat over a longer distance.

This requires a different tool to measure.

The winding sticks.

Winding sticks are two sticks that can stand on edge, have tops that have the same angle relative to their bottoms.

Think of them as thick rulers that can be easily balanced on edge.

The sticks are placed near the ends of the board, across the board.

You then lower your eye, watching for the far stick to disappear behind the near stick.

If the sticks are parallels, then the far stick should disappear at once. If there is any twist, one end will disappear before the other.

That indicates that the other side is high, relative to the near stick.

This tells you where to remove wood to remove the twist.

As long as the sticks have the same angle, relative to their bases, then this works great.

So I need winding sticks to finish prepping my apron boards.

Making Winding Sticks

Simple, plane one face of a 4×1 by 16 inches smooth. Make it flat, ignore minor twist. I.e., get it as flat as you can without winding sticks.

Now hold the board on its edge and plane the other edge smooth and square to the major face. Then flip it over and do the same for the other edge.

You require a square to make sure that the edge is perpendicular to the face.

This requires holding the board on edge. Except I don’t have a vise to clamp the board on edge.

We’ll assume I can solve that with a wedge board, later.

Once you have both edges square to the face, use your marking gauge (you do have a marking gauge? If not, stop now and make one.) to find the narrowest part of the board. Use that to strike a line (another skill) from one end to the other.

Now plane the board to that line. When you are done, if you have done everything well, you will have two smooth edges, square to the face, and parallel to each other.

At this point, use your marking gauge to find the center of the board. You can do this by eye, actually. Still another skill.

Stroke a line down the center, carry it to the back of the board, maintaining your registration on the same reference edge.

Now rip the board into two equal, or nearly equal, halves. Still another skill I have to learn.

That’s where my bandsaw comes into play. That is what I will use instead of a hand saw. I don’t have the vise to rip safely and easily.

Find the narrowest part of both boards with your marking gauge. Strike that line. Plane down to the line.

When done, you will have two boards that should be the same. You can joint them to make sure, this is the best thing to do.

If you joint them, make sure you mark the matching ends so that you can easily find them again.

You now have your winding sticks. To make it a bit better, darken the top edge of one of the sticks, to create contrast when you are using them.

Notch Board

Another tool. Find a 1×6 about 12 inches long. Find the center and mark a point 4 inches from one end at that center.

Drop lines from a point 1 inch in from the edges to the center marked point.

Now drill a 1/4 inch hole at the center point.

Rip cut from the end to the hole. This will create a V notch, 3.5 inches wide at the mouth and just a 1/4 wide at the throat.

You can now attach this V notch board to the surface of your workbench near the left end, or in my case, one of my apron boards, with the notch facing the center of the board.

You can now place almost any board, on edge, and jam it into that notch. The notch will hold the board upright, on edge.

Now just plane to the lines.

Conclusion

I’m having a blast turning knowledge into skills. This is my daily exercise. I figure that by the end of today, I should have the second trestle completed.

While the adhesive is drying, I will plane the two apron boards smooth and flat, ready to be attached to the legs, which I have already planed smooth and flat.

Maybe I’ll have something good to report by Friday.